Projekt "W" - Phase 1 - Release!
Posted on August 14, 2007
| Sascha
 After a year of work it's time to celebrate the release of the most complex and ambitious of my programming career! **Project "W" - Phase 1 is finally here and free for you to download and play!** Head over to the game’s new page and grab a copy of the game (Windows 32, Installer, ~30 MBytes, includes german and english). The page also includes a lot of information on the game itself as well as a bunch of new screenshots, so while downloading it you can read through the page and browse the shots.
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Working towards release and littel name-change
Posted on July 27, 2007
| Sascha
The closer you get towards releasing your game the more small things surface that have to be taken care off before going public, and so over the last days/weeks I have been busy mostly taking care of small bugs and annoyances that needed fixing. Actually I already could have released it but everyone of you working on a game/application knows the feeling when you’re close to release. On the one hand you want to release it (in order to take the weight off your shoulders) but on the other hand you want to release something that’s as smooth and polished as possible.
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Artificial intelligence
Posted on July 4, 2007
| Sascha
Some postings ago I already told you that the AI for Project “W” is the first more complex AI that I did (and still do) so I’m gonna post a bit about it this time. My initial goal was to create an artificial intelligence that’s giving the player a challenge without cheating but that’s also behaving different from game-to-game. The first point is pretty clear, if an AI is cheating the player will start to notice it after some matches and it makes the player feel betrayed, which is a real no-go.
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Good news for owners of old graphics cards and more on AI
Posted on June 21, 2007
| Sascha
As some people over at a forum I’m active in noted that they wouldn’t be able to play Projekt “W” cause their graphics cards don’t support shaders, I decided to spent some time on implementing a renderpath that works without shaders. Especially the globe uses a more complex shader and recreating something at least similar with the fixed function pipeline wasn’t that easy but in the end I got something that works on old cards and still looks good enough.
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Manual and soundsystem
Posted on June 14, 2007
| Sascha
As the project is already close to finish I started to write the manual several days ago and just finished the english one (the game will include german and english languages, so a german manual will also be included) and it’s roughly 15 pages long. And as this game is a bit more complex than most of my other games it’s really recommended to read this cause otherwise out would be hard to play.
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More playtesting, balancing, bughunting and AI
Posted on June 5, 2007
| Sascha
The title exactly sums up what I’ve been doing on Projekt “W” the last couple of days. After an extensive round of playtesting I squashed the last few remaining bugs and problems I encountered and was finally able to play a whole game without any troubles, crashes or other things that disturbed a smooth gameplay experience. It took me around 90 turns to finish a whole game, playing the oceanic front.
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Transfer market, new cursors, texture compression and more
Posted on May 24, 2007
| Sascha
Since the last update on Project “W” I worked on a lot of smaller things and also did a lot of work on the “background” of the game (the stuff most players won’t notice but which is still important to work on), so this news posting will be a collection of all the things I did over the last days.
Transfer market : This was actually the last thing that was really bugging me as up until recently each staff member would have the same image with only name and values being different, so I started to take care of this and in the final version there will be around a dozen of different faces for each of the professions (scienists, spies and generals) so the staff you hire is much more personalized and can easily be recognized.
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First playtesting sessions and hardware requirements
Posted on May 17, 2007
| Sascha
Although there are still some minor things to do before I can call it a version that’s ready to getting released, Projekt “W” is now in a shape where you can actually play a whole game without it throwing an exception (so far all show-stoppers have been fixed). So today I made the first two playtesting session with the first one being interrupted with a bug that I quicly fixed followed by a second playtesting session.
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On the state of Project "W"
Posted on May 12, 2007
| Sascha
I just crossed the last remaining things off from my todo-list for the demo (except for one point which is finishing one of the remaining nation backgrounds) and so far I have been very pleased with it’s progress since I started on the new version back in august 2006 (I still have a backup from that date on my disk in order to quickly check progress). Recently a friend of mine came by and after showing him the current in-developement version he was stunned by the professional looks of it so I guess it’s going in the right direction and all the work I’ve put into it in the end will pay out.
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Hotseat mode is in
Posted on May 4, 2007
| Sascha
As already hinted at in my last posting on the subject of Project “W” I implemented the hotseat-multiplayer-mode, which will be the only multiplayer-mode present in the demo. For those that don’t know about it, hotseat is a multiplayer-mode that only uses one PC and therefore only can be used in a turn-based game (like Project “W”). So before starting such a game (see first screenshot) you choose what nation is controlled by a human player (other nations are played by the computer, disabling a whole nation is not possible but maybe later on with different game modes) and you can also set the number of ressources each nation has at the start of the game.
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